Supermarkets are a fount of inspiration for Catillation. Here’s a collection of the weirder movie tie-in products I’ve noticed in Harris Teeter and Giant lately.
Wakanda Forever, Even If It Never Was
I’m a little tardy in posting about the Dozen Cousins products, so they are probably no longer available in HT. As with so many of these tie-ins, they’re ephemeral, cynical cash-grabs, or maybe (if you have an exaggerated sense of the absurd as I suspect I do), the ultimate ironic hipster statements.
There were two products from A Dozen Cousins on offer: “Wakandan Coconut Rice” and “Wakandan Jerk Seasoning” and who’s to say they’re not? I can report on the taste of the Coconut Rice sauce mix only because I found a few packets on the reduced rack a week or so after I took this picture. It was mild to the point of unobtrusiveness.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Petits-Fours
This display wins the prize for most cognitive dissonance in a movie tie-in for this year, hands-down. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem Cake Bites” conjure visions of the Turtles sitting down to tea: cucumber sandwiches (with the crusts cut off), crumpets with clotted cream perhaps, Earl Grey tea (hot), and a lovely assortment of dainty little one-bite iced cake morsels. I could kind of see myself eating one, if I closed my eyes against the green icing, but HT hasn’t reduced them yet.
Here’s a question: can the Mutant Turtles raise their pinkies as they drink their tea? Which segues nicely into:
The Pink Swoozes Into Giant Food
And finally, a Barbie tie-in: a display of “Barbie x Swoon Barbie Pink Lemonade” greets shoppers in the Giant lobby. I’d never heard of this brand of monk fruit-sweetened drink, and I’m already tired of Barbie references (full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m planning to soon). But there was one can perched pertly on the reduced rack, only slightly dented, so I sprang for it.
The first thing you notice is that the drink isn’t pink, although the ingredients list includes strawberry juice and “vegetable juice (for color).” It tasted nothing like lemonade, pink or any other color, and had an off-putting chemical aroma, matched by the taste. I wouldn’t willingly drink it again. Maybe monk fruit is an acquired taste? This is one piece of ephemera I won’t miss a bit when it’s gone.
